refenestrator

If you're going to attack mercantilism from a free trade perspective, the IMF is at the other end of that pole. That's where your ideas were tried and failed in practice.

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China are all huge success stories due to protecting nascent industries while they caught up with more industrialized states.

First off, 600 million is not "90 percent" of China.

Second, do you think 2/3 of China are uniquely brain-washable, in that they're living in really bad conditions yet believe they're good because of the TV programming?

Or is it possible that, while foreign to the US, their bad conditions are actually way better than 30 years ago, let alone 50?

Citation needed given the poverty and gdp numbers over there the last 30 years.

You can compare/contrast with other impoverished nations that followed the IMF agenda, and how that worked out for them.

China never wanted foreign investment/ownership of their tech companies, that's why this cockamamie scheme with an associated service company listed in NY arose in the first place.

Reminds me of the people who got mad about the auto bailouts in 08 because the junk bonds they were holding didn't pay out. You bought the bonds! This is on you!

You're right, I was thinking of oligopoly more in the terms where it's usually applied to Russia and the ruling 'set' all have different, separate power bases.

I know this is just semantics but I actually like 'technocratic autocracy' better than any sort of oligopoly to describe China. There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government. And, so far, they've been quite dynamic on the technocratic front, people get fired for incompetence despite having a political base.

I was a rubber stamp and found myself in high demand to interview in a location the company was trying to staff up rapidly.

Write a script that deploys something to a fresh ec2 instance.. then you can say you used aws for your side project.

Aws is like 800 services, but under it all is ec2 and s3 -- just get familiar with those and the rest are conveniences.

Worth noting that we have different incentives in the US even accounting for different philosophies.

US big tech is globally influential, clipping their wings would reduce that influence. Chinese big tech is generally more about the large Chinese market and diaspora.

Are they not nerds?

It started on Slashdot IIRC. Maybe 'nerd culture' works better to include 4chan.

No, I'm referring to generic geopolitical rivalry plus cover for mismanagement of the crisis domestically.

If we can make it all China's fault, that's a win for us. Facts, evidence or lack thereof aren't material compared to interests and arguments.

Sars and bird flu both did it in that part of the world quite recently. It's not like the phenomenon is unheard of.

Maybe it's unlikely but when you also have a billion people in third world conditions.. it's not that unlikely after all.

Why limit your cynicism? The US has plenty of motivation as well.

Educated Chinese generally speak some English, they are way more exposed to our system/culture than we are to theirs.

If you're not open to other opinions, you will hear none, and that's entirely on you.

In extremely broad strokes, China has gone from colonized and poor to powerful and rich. Is it so hard to believe that the average Zhao is pretty OK with things?

Go one level deeper and ask why you're never exposed to that viewpoint.

Washington Post and NYT will happily run Adrian Zenz all day long, even though he's a right wing religious nut and they're secular liberals, but you never see them print the majority viewpoint of actual Chinese people.

There's an interesting phenomenon, specific to US tech, where there are a ton of Chinese who quietly have a problem with the recent anti-china rhetoric, but they're not going to put a target on their back over it, they stay quiet. How do you even engage with someone who doesn't speak a word of Chinese and is so confident that they know all about China?

Meanwhile, the anti-china folks blithely go on about how much better freedom of expression is in America, and assume that silence means they are right.

Worth noting that ANT financial had major risk and accounting shenanigans and regulators were probably in the right to block the IPO until they were sorted out better.

It's more true of API, look at an Indian, Chinese and Samoan person.

The API group is basically "everyone else".

The point is the headline. "Risky Coronavirus China".

The entire lab leak theory gets smuggled in as a background assumption.

Another interesting angle about the single real server is the reliability.. it'll eventually break from some physical cause, that happens, it hurts your uptime.

But sometimes with the big microservice/kubernetes solution, the configuration space is so big that miscommunications/mistakes could potentially take you down for more hours/year than the downsides of being single-hosted would. So now you invested all of that effort and for what?

One company I worked for wrote a distributed scheduled jobs system that was immune to single-machine failures, it went down like 4 times in a year, messing up my team each time. I was like "guys, if we just provisioned one machine with cron and no failover, it would have better reliability".

Constant attempts to hack each other between rivals and even allies are not a big deal.

I'm not saying this is fake, our people should be doing their job mitigating this stuff and hacking them in turn, but it being blown up into a Big Deal is part of the propaganda.

It's not about the specific allegations, it's about the posture and priorities of the security state.

A few years ago, we ran out of fear and urgency on the Islamic terror thing and now we need a new top dog bad guy.

That hinges on the extent to which Assange personally exfiltrated documents.

NYT vs US established that its totally OK to publish documents you receive. They're trying to make Assange a 'conspirator' in the exfiltration for working with Manning. Apparently the extent of his alleged direct involvement was receiving a password hash but not actually cracking or doing anything with it: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1153486/downl...

It's not uncomfortable at all from where I'm sitting, I had thought we settled this with Ellsburg and the pentagon papers.

Assange had no clearance and took no oaths regarding this information. Converting "working with a source" into "conspiracy to access an information system" because the files were on a computer instead of in a drawer should fail the smell test.

You need a cite for that, and some definition of 'scientist' that actually lends credibility.

"Couldn't have been natural" is especially a stretch, given that SARS and Bird Flu manifested naturally in the same part of the world a few years prior.

Consider that he grew up in the Arab world on one side of a conflict.

What if he were Palestinian? Are all of them unwelcome at Google if they had an unmoderated thought in their lives?

If taking the job of congressperson required a blind trust, it wouldn't be an issue.